When you have a visual impairment, it may seem that you will never be able to read again, and that can be a bitter pill to swallow. We rely on reading every day - whether it is reading for practical purposes such as reading our mail and reading restaurant menus, or reading for pleasure such as books and magazines. That's why reading is the number one thing that people come to us for help with in The Chicago Lighthouse's Assistive Technology Center. Luckily, there are a number of different devices available to help with this very problem!

The holidays are here right on time, and with them comes the question of what to buy for friends and family. Luckily, The Chicago Lighthouse is here to help! We have lots of great gift ideas available for the special person with a visual impairment in your life, from inexpensive everyday items all the way up to the latest assistive technologies. Here's some great gift ideas for this season!

The Orcam 2.0 has released, the latest generation of OCR/TTS devices from Orcam. But what is OCR/TTS I hear you ask? Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) are the technologies which allow a device to take a picture of a page of text and read it aloud to you. Sound futuristic? This technology has been around since the 1970s, but Orcam have taken it to a new level with their 2.0 models.